


Meditations on Simulations and Loneliness

by Heronymus



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:07:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22138309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heronymus/pseuds/Heronymus
Summary: Nikki versus Pirates!And are you technically alone if you're carrying copies of people in your head to have conversations with?
Comments: 60
Kudos: 83





	1. And who are you when you are at home?

The first thing Nikolai Vorsoisson thought, when they took the black fabric bag off of his head and he could see (and breathe) properly again, was something that his stepfather had told him.

“If they’re wearing masks when they take you, it’s actually a good sign. It means they want to hide their faces, which means they do intend to give you back, and they don’t want you to be able to identify them. If they’re wearing masks, there’s hope.” Since Miles Vorkosigan had some experiencing with kidnapping (apparently on both sides), it was good information.

The fact that everyone in the room other than him was wearing a mask, therefore, should not be frightening, it should be heartening. The question was, did anyone else from the jumpship make it out alive, either? Was this a pirate raid on the shipping line, in the hopes of netting some valuable cargo, and the kidnapping and ransom was just a side-gig? Or was it someone who’d decided to aim specifically for him, in the misguided belief that he was somehow something to someone on Barrayar? So many of the non-Barrayarans in the wider galactic culture had little-to-no grasp of how Nikki’s homeworld actually worked, not that in his experience “worked” was the right word…

He was drifting. The headache seemed unfamiliar, so probably not a stunner pulse; maybe some sort of gas? He had been off-duty, in his bunk, when the klaxons had sounded, and his emergency station was right were he was, since the pilot and co-pilot on-shift were already on the bridge. As third-shift co-pilot, he was not important enough to be called to the bridge except in a really, really bad emergency, but he was too important given his special skills and implants to help out with damage control or safety response. Instead, his job was to stay put and safe, unless and until the captain called him to a different duty station. The alarms had woken him up, but he’d just had time to strap himself down before the alarms suddenly died out, and then… nothing, until here. So, yeah, assume some sort of gas.

Gas was good; gas meant they weren’t going to be casual about life, by say evacuating all of the air in the ship and heaving out the corpses while they cleared the cargo out. Gas meant they wanted the crew and passengers alive, which may not be good news at all, come to think of it; there were a lot of different phrases and weasel-words for it, but “chattel slavery” kept floating through his forebrain… Again, he was drifting. That gas must have been something. Nikki shook his head hard, trying to clear it, and screwed his eyes shut before opening them again.  
“Get the lay of the land. If you can, get them talking. Don’t try to bluff or bluster. They have the power, but you can get control, if you’re careful. And control can lead to power, if you’re patient. As long as you’re breathing, you’ve got hope.” Miles’ mouth turned up at one corner, in what some might call a smile, but Nikki knew better. “Hell, even if you’re not breathing, you’ve still got hope. But breathing is better. Trust me.” At the time, Nikki had taken all of the various advice with a grain of salt; his somewhat more thorough briefing from the K&R expert during the on-boarding period had echoed it enough, though, that he’d remembered more than he thought.

So: there were four people in the room, besides him. It was one of those utility rooms that could be on a ship, or a station, or in a basement on a planet somewhere...utterly unidentifiable and yet another good sign that they were going to try and ransom him. There was a small table in the center of the room, and two chairs. Nikki sat in one; across from him, a compact, lithe person of indeterminate gender in what looked like a shipknit suit with no identifiable patches, and wearing a balaclava-style mask. No sense of hair color, but brown eyes, and the skin underneath and at the hands and wrists were a particular shade of honey-brown that said “galactic multicross” heritage, sort of the average color of humans with a lot of different backgrounds in their genetic makeup. No gloves, but the hands themselves were thin and dextrous, or at least looked it. Did they play the piano, or other keyboard-style instruments, perhaps? It looked like they had the reach for it.

Of the other three, Nikki could only see two, but he assumed the third one, behind him, was of the same look: big, bulky, comfortable with the weapons holstered on their belts, careful on their feet which indicated a history of close-quarters combat. People used to controlling others with size, and possibly an arm-lock or the like. Also in shipknits, also wearing full-face masks.  
So, the fellow across the table was the important one. The rest were just muscle, or at least that was what he was supposed to think. Nothing is true until verified, nothing is verified without proof, nothing is proof without outside confirmation, outside confirmation is impossible without freedom, therefore: while in captivity, nothing is true, except your own thoughts and memories (and even those can be tricky).

It occurred to Nikki that no one had said anything yet, which had given him plenty of time to think and for his head to start to clear. Was this a test? Were the captors waiting for him to say something, or try something, or break down and cry? Nikki had gotten pretty good at tests, though never with the seeming ease that his half-sister Helen had seemed to muster. Nikki had had to study, and study, and study…even after he had gotten out of university and into the pilot apprentice program, there had been homework, and tests, and studying. Was this something they’d covered in the K&R training? Or something Miles had told him? Whatever the gas had been, the lingering effects were beginning to be seriously annoying…

The person across the table from him huffed, in exactly the way certain middling teachers had huffed when Nikki had gotten up to turn in an exam, then taken one more pass through the answers to double check them. A tired sort of annoyance, that was, and it wasn’t clear to him whether that was a good thing or a bad thing from a pirate-and-possible-kidnapper.

“Are you,” the person said, their voice a middling contratenor, “Nicholai Vore-soy-eye-sun?”

“Vorh-swah-sonne”, Nikki corrected automatically. “My family’s from French stock. Fish, not venom.”

“What?”

“Fish; poisson is fish in French, so...you know what, nevermind. Yes, I’m Nick.” ‘Nick’ had been a new thing, when he got his first posting. No longer apprentice. No longer “Nikki” the child, he’d been a real grown-up with a real job and a real position, granted it was second-seat on third-shift of a cargo freighter. He was a jump pilot, and no one could tell him different, so take that, Da… So he’d been Nikolai Vorsoisson, Nick to his fellow crew, very Galactic and Grownup. And also why he’d never given Alex any grief about his several name-changes. Finding a name for yourself was pretty important, especially when Miles was always hovering on the horizon.

“Nicholai Vorsoisson, do you know where you are?” The person got the pronunciation exactly right on the second try. Nice trick.

“I assume I am in the hold of a ship, or possibly on a station somewhere, being held by a person or persons unknown. Unless I was unconscious for a lot longer than I thought was, in which case I could be pretty much anywhere. Though I don’t think we’ve hit a jump point yet, because I can usually count those even in my sleep.” Which was true, in fact; Nikki had never not known he’d gone through a jump, even when out cold, though come to think he hadn’t yet tried it under sedation. Why would anyone want to sedate themselves for the coolest ride ever? Shoving oneself through a dropped-stitch in spacetime was the best combination of lightflier and roller-coaster he could think of.

The figure seemed a bit flustered by the answer. “Have you experience with being held against your will?”

“Only by my uncle. Oh, and the pillock who was courting my ma. Well, and there was that time with...hm, yeah, nevermind, and that wasn’t technically against my will, anyway. Why?”  
Nikki could see the vagaries of what he’d guess was a smile crinkling the corners of the eyes under the mask. “You seem very calm. Most people in your position are either blustery or terrified, but calm is… well, not entirely ‘new’, but it certainly points you in an interesting direction.”

“Please don’t mistake me,” Nikki said. “I’m honestly terrified; as far as I can remember, there was a forced boarding of my ship, and now I’m a prisoner of pirates. That’s not at all how I expected this trip to go; it’s my first on-board assignment.”

The person shook their head. “We are not pirates, Mr. Vorsoisson. We interdicted your transshipment in order to ascertain value and assess fees. Cooperation and prompt payment by your employers will result in all of this simply being a short pause on your route, and no one need be further inconvenienced.”

“Ah, so you’re polite and intelligent pirates, then. Although, if you’re working for an existing polity, that would technically make you privateers, not that it will matter. I don’t know enough about how the insurance works to confirm or deny anything, sorry. I’m third-shift co-pilot, so most of my time is spent studying and waiting for someone else to get sick.”

“That is extremely interesting to me, Mr. Vorsoisson, because your Captain seemed very interested to make sure that you, specifically, were still alive and unharmed. Not that he wasn’t concerned about all of his crew and passengers, but your name specifically floated out of him. Why do you think that is?”

Nikki grimaced, then sighed. He thought he’d managed to find a spot himself, not because of some misplaced nepotism. He’d specifically asked Liasa not to say anything to anyone, but if the Captain was asking about him… well, nothing for it now. Just try to get along.

“It’s possible,” Nikki said, “that Captain Lagos has some ideas about my personal life that are mistaken. Honestly, it’s one of the biggest problems with the Vor caste system. Everyone thinks we all know each other.”

The person sniffed, audibly. “It is a very good thing you are a jump-pilot, Mr. Vorsoisson, because you are a terrible liar.”

“I don’t believe I’ve uttered any falsehoods here; it’s not worth my life to lie to the person holding the gun. So to speak.”

“No guns, Mr. Vorsoisson, at least not yet. Everyone has been very sensible, so far. Your Captain was sensible when we hailed them, and put up only a token resistance, which was good for him. Our boarding parties were quite unopposed. Your convoy escort didn’t even try to engage us, instead doing a hard turn and fleeing at a rate that was quite surprising, honestly. In the past it’s been our experience that the escorts will sometimes do rash, almost foolhardy things in the name of ‘valor’ or ‘honor’ or whatnot, but then it has a tendency to get...messy.”

“You’d know better than I do what the rules are for our military escorts. I avoided that side of the aisle since I was old enough to know better. The only regs I know about are on the commercial side, and those are generally along the lines of ‘do what the captain says, don’t make trouble, don’t be stupid’, at least at my level. It’s likely there are more in-depth orders as you go up the ladder from here, but I’m never going to be a captain anyway; they don’t make pilots captains for the same reason they don’t make guard dogs out of foxes. We like the jumps too much to ever say no.” Nikki grinned a bit. Honestly, it was more like making pharmacists out of drug addicts, but anyone who wasn’t a pilot wouldn’t understand, and anyone who was, didn’t need a metaphor.

“So let us then,” said the pirate, “return to the subject at hand: who is Nikolai Vorsoisson when he is at home? And what value can you bring to the table?”

Ah, Nikki thought, here’s the crux of the matter. Ransom. How much was his name worth? “Well, my father died when I was a kid, and my mother then remarried and started another family shortly after. I’ve been training to be a jump pilot since I was a teenager, so my personal account is roughly three hundred thousand marks in the red, minus whatever sort of hazard pay I may rate for this little detour. We haven’t made a portage since our departure, so I don’t have my pay packet yet, and when I boarded I had one hundred and fourteen marks in my credit account. Oh, and I have a very nice model kit in my footlocker, which I have not yet opened, which is probably worth about sixty marks or so.” Nikki grimaced. “I do hope my travel insurance covers this. I admit to not having read the packet all that closely.”

The person shook their head again, then sighed. “Very well. Please remain here, and do not try to exit this room. Things could get very unpleasant if you do. I shall return shortly to determine what happens next.” They stood up, and were very careful about exiting the room without ever getting within arms-length of Nikki. That was rather flattering, though misplaced; Nikki had never done better than middling-well in his close-quarters training. Which was fine: he was a pilot. The new implants were some sort of conductive alloy that could be blended to match any dermal color and texture, so they didn’t shine like beacons the same way past pilot implants had, but they were still there; he could still feel them, the little round spots of no-feeling at his temples and forehead that let him connect himself to a jumpship and go for the ride of several lifetimes…

The third person moved out from behind Nikki and made exit with the others, and then Nikki was alone in a small room with a table, two chairs, and a locked door. No lav or sink or other plumbing, small vents for atmo both high up in the corners and along the base of the wall, probably to keep air circulation going even if gravity was turned off. So, a station or ship, then. Or possibly an asteroid base of some sort? Wherever it was, he was in a room where they could shut off the power and the air and it would be the end of him.

“A tricky conundrum, to be sure, but you’re still upright and breathing, so keep your wits about you and you may get through this yet,” Miles said, inside Nikki’s head. The fact that Nikki was realizing, in a situation where he had been kidnapped, drugged, and isolated, that he was carrying around a simulation of his stepdad in his head who was exactly as annoying as the real Miles was not exactly heartening. But at least he wasn’t, technically, alone.


	2. Complicated Answers to Simple Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki tries to explain inheritance.

There was no clock, and they had taken his wristcomm, so Nikki didn’t really have a way to tell time. The lights never flickered, faltered, or dimmed, and there were no windows in the room. The door was sealed tight, with no window or viewport, so there wasn’t even the chance of picking up clues from the hall outside. There was nothing in the room except the two chairs, the table, and him. So after pacing the perimeter of the space a couple of times, he sat down again, and tried not to fidget. What would Miles do in this situation?

“Well, to be quite honest,” the shade of Miles said with that particular dryness reserved for when he told the very best disaster stories of his personal history, “I would probably be bouncing off the walls with boredom. There’s no corners to get my fingernails under, and no one to yell at or convince I’m the good guy. And nothing to read and no fellow prisoners to lead in a revolt. For me, this is basically hell. But hey, at least you’re still wearing clothes.”

Nikki grinned at that, remembering the caustic commentary on the holovid adaptation of the big Prison Break Story that had been classified for so long.

Well, there wasn’t a way out, and there wasn’t a next step, and there wasn’t anyone to plead with or cajole, so: time to keep busy. And so Nikki began to recite jump routes. The first several ones he thought of were obvious and easy to remember, all starting with Barrayar and passing through Komarr, before branching off various ways. Then he moved into the deeper routes, the multi-jump runs to Earth and beyond. He tried to remember the routes through Cetegandan territory, including the lanes that ran on past Eta Ceta IV, some of which were not entirely explored or mapped. This brought him back around to the route they were (at least theoretically) still on now, beyond Jackson’s Whole and past Kibou-Dani through a couple of newly-founded polities before looping back past Earth and Beta colony and the long run home again, with various stops. It was the fourth of seven jumps, and the second of the three newly-recognized inhabited systems, where they had been hijacked. This run should have taken about 18 months, give or take. Now it wasn’t clear just exactly how long he’d be out here, or if they’d continue on via the loop or turn around and head straight home again.

And come to think of it: what had actually happened to their escort? Granted that this was a three cargo-ship convoy with one relatively small frigate for protection, but it was somewhat unexpected that rather than engage the enemy, the naval warship had simply turned and ran. It ran counter to every Barayarran military tradition, not to mention the expectation of standing orders. Was the pirate -- excuse me, privateer -- ship count and firepower really so overwhelming that it would have driven off the escort without engaging? Or had there been a change to the standing orders of which he was unaware? That was entirely possible, even likely; he was, after all, the co-pilot of third shift, which was as close to “extraneous personnel” as one could get and still be employed.

But dammit, it was still a pilot’s chair. It was still time in flight. It was still logged hours towards his next position. And a good report after an 18-month tour was worth a lot of credit, both literally and figuratively. He hadn’t been kidding about that three hundred thousand mark debt, although it was actually in Betan dollars, the clinic at which he’d had the work done insisting on the currency exchange (though, as Uncle Mark liked to point out, the Barayarran mark had seen significant gains against other galactic notes in the last twenty years). Miles was a Count, with all the enormous amounts of money involved in managing one-sixty-fourth of a planetary government, but he also wasn’t, to quote Mark again, ‘particularly liquid’. And while his personal remittance had been generous by many standards, it didn’t go particularly far in taking a bite out of his loan. Though it did mean that almost all of his salary was being plowed back into extra payments, reducing the life of loan and hinting at the real possibility that he’d be free and clear before he moved up to first chair. Which would allow him more leeway in the contracts he could take on, and maybe even let him apply for Survey jobs ahead of schedule.

But all of that was in the future. Right now, he was stuck on the wrong side of a locked door. He started thinking through jump routes again, this time in alphabetical order.

He was trying to remember all of the jumps out of Quaddie Space in reverse chronological order by discovery date when the door opened again, and the masked person came back into the room, this time without the three guards. Nikki rolled off the table where he had been lying, staring at the blankness that was the ceiling, and at a gesture from the pirate once again sat down. The person sat across from him, then laced their fingers together and rested their elbows on the table.

Nikki didn’t bother waiting. “Is there a name I could call you, if we’re going to continue having conversations? I keep thinking of you as ‘that person in the mask’ and that feels very unwieldy.”

The pirate snorted. “You may refer to me as Albion, if you like.”

“Very well,” Nikki said. “Thank you, Albion. You’ll forgive me for forgoing the usual ‘nice to meet you’ pleasantries.”

“That’s entirely reasonable, Mr. Vorsoisson. Or should I call you Mr. Vorkosigan?” Albion seemed to be trying to convey something shocking or surprising in the tone of their voice.

“You should definitely not call me that. I am most certainly not a Vorkosigan, and lots of people, including me, would get very upset if you referred to me that way.”

“So your father is not Miles Vorkosigan?”

“My father was Etienne Vorsoisson. He’s dead, and has been for quite some time. My step-father, emphasis on the step, is Miles, yes, but he did not adopt me nor am I his heir, and I have not changed my name. He married my mother when I was nine. My half-brother, Alex, would probably be the one most upset by you calling me a Vorkosigan, but I’m pretty sure Miles would be right behind him.” It felt weird to Nikki calling him Miles in conversation with someone, but he was pretty sure calling him “The Count” would just muddy the waters that were already pretty muddied.

“The company database mentioned something about your permanent residence being Vorkosigan House; is that some sort of apartment building, then?”

“Oh, no, that’s the ancestral home of Miles’ family, and where my mother lives. I’ve mostly been in school dorms and temporary bachelor housing for the last while, so it’s just easier to send my mail there. They let it stack up a bit and then ship it along as necessary.”

“So, even though you are the eldest son, you’re not part of the Vorkosigan line?”

Nikki sighed. “Like I said during the first interview, most galactics don’t really grasp the various Vor conventions. Miles married my mother, yes. But he didn’t adopt me, so I was never the heir. He and my mother have several children together, all of whom are Vorkosigan, and my little brother Alexander is officially the heir. Alex has a twin sister, and four other siblings of various ages. Miles wanted a big family. My father, on the other hand, only ever wanted one child.”

“So you are his heir?”

“Technically, yes, though when he died he was so destitute all he left me was my name.” And my name’s word, Nikki thought, and I’ve done my best to redeem both over the years. “He was rather a bastard, my Da, so I can’t say as I’m particularly disappointed in the outcome.”

“And you can’t think of any reason why your captain is so dead-set on making sure you’re unharmed, over and above all of the other crew? When we fast-penta’d him, he seemed to think your family connections were something of an important item to get across to us. I quote, ‘Just make sure Nick’s left alone, that’s a nest you best not be poking,’ is what he said under direct questioning.”

“I have had exactly three conversations with Captain Lagos: once when I came aboard to report for duty, and then twice more during Captain’s Table, which is a rotating duty among all pilots. If we’ve exchanged more than two dozen words I’ll be shocked. I’m pretty sure he’s got an inflated idea of just what Vor castes in specific and Baryarran culture in general are all about when you get right down to it. Most Komarrans tend to overreact when it comes to all of…” he waved his hands indistinctly “...that.”

“And if I were to fast-penta you and ask you more pointed questions?” Albion asked, their voice carefully neutral.

“You’d be exceptionally disappointed to find out that I have an allergy to fast-penta and I’d likely be dead before you got any answers.” Nikki did not add that the allergy was had been induced by ImpSec when he’d gotten acceptance into a jump-pilot school on Komarr just after finishing high school. It had been a condition of travelling off-world while still in possession of a direct commline to Gregor. He still had the comcard, tucked into his personal kit in his cabin. Or had, anyway; someone had likely gone through his stuff, though what they’d done with it was a different question.

“I’d like to test that; not that I don’t believe you, but better to confirm things, you know how it is.”

Nikki rolled up one sleeve and laid his bare arm across the table. “Feel free to test as many times as you like.”

Albion pulled a test strip from a pocket and peeled off one of the circles, carefully laying it across the inside of Nikki’s offered wrist. It took to the count of 20 before the itching started to become noticeable, and the red welts started to form. A little sigh, and then they peeled it off again, and offered him a soothing wipe from a different pocket. Nikki took it, nodded thanks, and carefully began to clean the affected area, very deliberately not scratching even though the itching was becoming more insistent. The analgesic in the wipe would do the work soon enough.

Albion stood and went back to the door, which opened without any sort of signal; they were obviously watching via some feed, probably all the time, but at least when he had visitors.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Vorsoisson. I shall return later, possibly with more questions. You should know that the negotiations for fees and travel tithes is going well, and it’s entirely possible you and your ship will be on your way in short order. Everyone is being quite reasonable; it’s been rather refreshing, honestly.”

“Well, if we can’t be civilized, what’s the point of civilization?” Nikki quipped, but it was possible the ironic tone was lost on Albion as they stepped through the doorway, and the door sealed again behind them.

“You’re doing a pretty good job of not giving away too much,” said Miles, or at least the shade of Miles that lived in Nikki’s head. “But you’re not really getting much from them. You should try drawing them out more.”

It was all Nikki could do not to roll his eyes at this imagined line of attack. Being a spy had only ever worked on him once. When he was eight. Leave it to Miles, even the fake Miles, to never forget something so trivial. Though it hadn’t been so trivial then, and to be honest, it might not be so trivial now.


	3. The Penny Drops

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki comes to a realization (with a little help from his simulated Miles).

It was rapidly becoming an issue that this room did not contain sanitary facilities and Nikki had just decided to go and hammer on the door when the door opened again. This time, there was no Albion, but rather one of the guard types. 

“Are you going to be trouble?” the guard asked in a rough baritone. 

“It seems unlikely? I guess the question is, what am I avoiding trouble for?”

“Do you want the toilet or not?”

“I most definitely do want the toilet, thank you very much, please lead on,” Nikki said, dragging his voice back down the couple of octaves it had climbed in the middle of his response. 

“C’mon,” said the guard, and wrapped a quite substantial hand around his bicep, firmly leading him down a nondescript hallway past several other identical doors with what looked like room numbers on the frame, before turning down a slightly shorter hall and then passing through another door marked “WC”. Inside was the standard one-person facility: toilet, sink, and what looked like a shower stall with a translucent door, which cemented Nikki’s belief that they were on some sort of ship or station. Everything looked low- or no-water operational. Nikki started to step towards the toilet, then stopped and turned to the guard still standing in the doorway. 

“Um, I don’t suppose I could convince you to step outside?”

The guard did not respond. 

“Fine, will you at least turn around? The bathroom has not been a public event for me in more than two decades.”

The guard grunted, and it seemed like they weren’t particularly inclined to be helpful, but then they stood up and turned so that they were looking out of the room instead of into it. 

“Close enough,” Nikki said, and took care of the most urgent matters.

They headed back to the holding room, and once Nikki stepped inside he realized that someone had been while he was away; on the table was a reddipak meal and a bottle of what he assumed was water. He hadn’t had much of an appetite, until he suddenly realized he was ravenous. The door had hardly closed behind him before he had fallen on the food and drink with a will.

“If I were devious,” Miles’ voice said, “I’d put something in the food or the water, and then use it as leverage to get the answers I was looking for.” Nikki paused, halfway through chewing the last bite of the handwrap of something leafy with bits of protein in. “Though, if I were really devious, I wouldn’t touch the food at all; I’d just tell the prisoner I’d done something with the food. No way for them to check, really, and it works just as well.” Nikki’s stomach did a slow, uncomfortable flip. Apparently, even the version of Miles in his head was an unrepentant bastard. 

“The thing is,” Miles continued, “nothing these people have done indicates that they’re particularly devious. In all, they’ve been exceptionally polite kidnappers and pirates. One wonders if that’s actually what they’re doing, or if this is some sort of pretext for a deeper motive. Piracy isn’t something gentlemen get into for kicks; folks have to be desperate, mean, craven, violent, or some combination thereof to think piracy is a good career choice.” Nikki nodded, and then realized he was nodding along to an imaginary voice in his head, and stopped. But Miles, or at least faux-Miles, was entirely correct. Piracy just didn’t make sense as a long-term political or economic strategy, especially if they were willing to throw kidnapping and ransom into the mix. This ship/base/whatever was in pretty good shape, which was counterfactual to everything he understood about the piratical nature. Piracy happened because of deprivation, and there wasn’t any deprivation apparent here. And privateering, state-sponsored piracy, really didn’t make any sense because generally around the second time it happened, the various big political players put together a multilateral force and stomped the offending polity into paste. 

Picking on interstellar trade was a bad idea. It was especially a bad idea to pick on Komarran and Komarran-associated fleets, because the Baryarran Navy had made no bones about responding with disproportionate force to attacks on Imperial trade. So what, or who, had decided that it was worth the risk to take on a long-haul Imperial convoy? And what, or who, could field a force big and loud enough to drive away a Naval escort without firing a shot? Even assuming the captain of the frigate was an inveterate coward, the crew itself surely would have mutinied to show some sort of flag-response, even if it was a forlorn hope. And from all Nikki could remember from the various briefing papers, the captain had a solid, if not very long, service record. If they had run, deserting the convoy, it had been a strategic move. It had meant that the attacking force had been completely overwhelming, and the proper response had been to rendezvous with a more substantial response force before returning to re-engage. Interstellar ships, even the small ones like this one, were horrendously expensive. One didn’t just give them up to an enemy and call it even. 

“So: who benefits in an interdiction of Imperial trade?” Miles was coaxing him. Trying to get him to think it through. See the angles. This was the chess thing all over again. Nikki had been, at best, a middling chess player, but playing with Miles had significantly improved his game. It had been particularly annoying to realize that all the board visualization Miles had tried to drill into him had improved Nikki’s five-space navigation instincts. He still ran the numbers, because you always run the numbers, but being able to hold the image in his head helped to refine the choices and speed up the decision trees. It had kept him, if not at the top of his class, in the top five. 

Cui bono: who benefits? The problem was, of course, that it wasn’t exactly clear from where he was sitting who would stand to gain from gobbling up a small convoy of middling goods in the back-of-beyond bound for Earth and points farther on. And why keep the crew alive? Not that he wasn’t grateful, but Nikki was pretty sure that any ransom they could get from returning the crew was a drop in the bucket compared to what they could get for the ships themselves, not to mention the cargo resale value. Even assuming they got a million marks per crewperson, that was a rounding error compared against even the scrap value, nevermind the resale value, even in Jackson’s Whole where no one looked too closely at the ownership records. 

So the pirates wanted the crews alive, and the ships intact. They were able to show up with overwhelming force, board easily, and disable everyone. They were willing to keep the crew prisoner, even supplying food and restroom breaks. All while the Barayarran Navy threatened to show up in enormous force and blow everyone to kingdom come just to prove it was a bad idea to play pirate. So, then, were the crews meant to work as hostages? They were obviously being observed, and that meant they were probably being recorded, which could be used as some sort of proof-of-life...especially if it were on a continuous feed. They weren’t being ransomed. They were being used as shields. If the Navy came storming back in, the idea was that the crew would act as a deterrent. Would that actually stop the Imperial Navy? Hm. Ten years ago, the answer would have been ‘probably not’, but ten years ago all the “new model” Imperial troops had been steeped in lectures and presentations about the Galactic Convention on Human Rights from Aral Vorkosigan. And now those New Model troops were in command positions. It was possible that a barrier of prisoners would keep the Navy from killing everyone out of hand. Possible.

But even with the human shield, piracy still didn’t make sense. It was a high-risk, moderate-reward proposition at best. Unless…

Unless the purpose of the piracy wasn’t to actually commit piracy. Unless whatever you were looking to steal wasn’t in the ships themselves, so you could at any time drop what you were doing and hare off into the black.

This wasn’t piracy. It wasn’t even a heist. 

This was a diversion. 

So the question became: was it the sort of diversion where the perpetrators burned down the building to get away? Or was there something holding them here, some trigger or safeword that let them know they were clear to disengage? The perpetrators were still wearing masks. Was that to keep them calm? Or did they actually expect to let everyone live and get away clean? And did the perpetrators even know they were a diversion? Or were they sacrificial lambs, told one thing and then left for the Imperial Navy to clean up?

And how does one begin to ask the interrogator of this band of pirates if they know they’re being hung out to dry? Nikki shook his head. He was a jump pilot. He had the implants for it and everything. He was not, dammit, an ImpSec agent. To quote Uncle Ivan, this was most definitely not his job. But could he safely assume that anyone else was doing this work? Surely the Security Officer was thinking about this. Except that Oleg, whom he liked very much, was mostly concerned with petty theft and drug use, not political games of three-card-monte. She was a very good security officer, got along well with everyone, and had diffused more than one possible difficulty with her good sense, good humor, and her six-foot-plus weightlifter’s frame. Was she doing anything to try and work out what the hell was going on? 

This was the problem with not being able to talk to anyone. It meant the only person he could talk to was, apparently, Miles. And Miles had a way of blowing things up just to see what came rocketing out of the containers. 

Who benefits? What group or collection of powers got what they wanted from the Imperial response to a pirate attack and ransom of a Komarran line in some odd jump point out in the middle of nowhere? And come to think of it, who would be involved that would keep trying to connect him to Miles, even making him explain more than once that he wasn’t Miles’ son and wouldn’t be particularly missed if something tragic happened? Who, in other words, had Lord Imperial Auditor Count Vorkosigan pissed off recently? And did Nikki know enough to make a guess? Or was it something better left alone?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a little short, mostly because Nikki and I both realized what was happening at about the same time.
> 
> Plotting? Outlines? Story planning? Who do think I am, some sort of professional writer?


	4. Fail-safe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki thinks, Miles holds forth, and I finally get the plot moving again!

There was another bathroom break, and another reddipack delivered while Nikki was out of the room. Time felt very taffy-like, but he wouldn’t bet that it had been much longer than a day. Well, not more than 10 marks. He was again finishing up some not-helped-by-being-shelf-stable miso soup and uramaki when the door opened again, and Albion came in and sat down across from Nikki.

“So, Nick,” they began, in a tone of voice that was a dead ringer for the ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ bit that his chemistry lab teacher had used when handing out grades, “there are nine officers, six pilots, seven engineers (including the chief engineer), and 27 maintenance, cargo, and supercargo crew per ship in this convoy. That’s 43 individuals per ship. There are three ships in your convoy. That’s a total of 147 crew serving, and we have made contact with everyone’s polity / family of record and asked for ransom. Do you know how many of those 147 have home addresses on Barrayar? Nine. Four of those individuals, including you, have a Vor name of some sort, none of them particularly high in the various social strata. Do you know how many families refused to post a ransom of any value, even after negotiations?”

Nick waited for a moment, then blinked hard. “Do I speak now?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to guess nine, though that’s a little disappointing, since there are a bunch of Komarrans on the crews and they should know about the Empire of Barrayar’s position on piracy and ransom.”

“Wait. You mean you’re disappointed that most of your fellow crew will be safely delivered home?” 

The hair on the back of Nikki’s neck stood up. “Well, yes, actually. The official position of my government is that they do not negotiate with pirates or terrorists. Everyone knows that’s not entirely true, but it’s certainly true enough in this case. Komarrans need to believe that they are subjects of His Imperial Majesty as well, and he holds his hand in protection over them, too.”

“You really hold your fellow citizens in such low esteem?”

“On the contrary. I know that our value as Subjects of the Imperium is greater than any amount of money. From the highest Vor to the lowest prole.” The grin Nikki let bloom on his face was not, perhaps, the friendliest of looks, but he didn’t like being threatened.

Albion stood up and, without another word, walked out of the room. 

Miles nodded from his place in the corner. “Nice job there. You didn’t say anything overt, made clear you were standing with your fellows, that you believe rescue is coming, and bared your teeth a little. If I were in their seat, I would be thinking about fast exits and what you know that they don’t.”

“Yes, well, I don’t know anything, so…”

Miles gesticulated wildly. “Don’t say that out loud! I wouldn’t guess they’re monitoring you all the time, but I’d bet they have a quick swipe through the feed on a regular basis.”

Nikki shook his head. It was never a good sign when your hallucination started telling you not to talk to yourself. He stood up and stretched, then decided that felt good, so he went through his entire calisthenics routine: pushups, leg lifts, squats, planks, bridges… there wasn’t a good place to grip so he couldn’t do real pull ups, but he sat down under the table and used the table edge to pull himself up off the floor. Enough to make him mildly sore, and awfully sweaty. The temperature in the room didn’t auto-adjust, apparently, and had he thought a little bit ahead, the idea of much longer without a shower was going to be a… challenge. But he was getting tired, and it didn’t look like they were going to turn off the lights, so he needed to wear himself out if he was going to get any sleep. If they were going to let him sleep, that is. Well, the only way out is through.

Nikki climbed up on the table, stuck his shipsoles behind his head, threw an arm over his eyes, and began reciting the fibonacci sequence. He dropped off somewhere in the middle of 63245986.

It had been an issue of no small contretemps in Vorkosigan House that Nikki had the ability to fall asleep basically anywhere. In pilot training school, it was even something of a party trick; other cadets had tired themselves out with round-the-clock studying, while Nikki was able to drop off in a couple of minutes, chair leaning against a wall, and wake up after an hour or so refreshed and ready to go. Waking up was always nearly instant, too: from zero to wide awake in three blinks. 

So when the gravity cut out, Nikki was awake before he had drifted off the table. He snagged his shipsoles and slipped them back on, hooked his foot on the underside of the table, and pulled himself up underneath. It was roughly in the center of the room, and bolted to the floor so if gravity suddenly came back, in any given direction, there would be something to grab onto to slow the fall. After a moment, the lights went out, and then the air ducts went silent. This didn’t have the feel of a catastrophe or a ship-wide power failure; nothing seemed to be on fire and there were no impacts or other weird vectors involved. 

This felt like coming into home port, when they turned everything off and everyone got shore leave. This was deliberate. 

“Well, it seems like things have begun to happen. I wonder how far off the fleet is? Or if they’ve gotten what they wanted and have abandoned anyone not worth the trouble?”  
Nikki shook his head, the vision of the Imperial fleet swooping in, hell bent for leather (what did that even mean?), blasting away at everything including the powered-down ship/base/whatever…

“Don’t just float there. See if the doors are fail-safe.” 

It was a good thing Miles was a figment of his imagination, or Nikki would be tempted to grab that cane of his and give him a wallop. More tempted, anyway. 

The door, it turned out, was not in fact locked any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, hey, did you know that a global pandemic can have serious deleterious effects on creativity?
> 
> Turns out it does! 
> 
> Anyway, here's an attempt to get me jump-started again...

**Author's Note:**

> I had the realization that I would never get the novel I wanted from LMB, and that was *totally OK*; it's her world, I'm just visiting. So I guess I decided to write my own?


End file.
